"
"A great sort of friend. And she came through too----?"
He did not answer at once, and he felt her look at him quickly,
anxiously, as though she had felt him shrink back into himself. She
heard something in his silence that he did not want her to hear. He put
his head down to the wind again, hiding a white, hard face.
"Oh, yes, and we still live in two rooms--over a garage in Drayton Mews.
My room 'folds up' in the day-time, and she sits there and knits woollen
things for the shops. She has to take life easily now. She had an
illness, and her eyes trouble her. But she's better--much better. And
next year everything will be different."
The street had run out into the still shadows of a great dim square. For
a moment they hesitated like travellers on the verge of unknown country;
then Francey crossed over to the iron-palinged garden and they walked on
side by side under the trees that rattled their grimy, fleshless limbs in
an eerie dance. There was no one else stirring. The eyes of the stately
Georgian houses were already closed in the weariness of their sad old age.
But she asked no questions. She seemed to have drifted away from him on
a secret journey of her own. He had to draw her back--make her
realize----
"I shall be a doctor then," he said challengingly.
"You said you would be a doctor. We quarrelled about it."
"How you remember things----"
"You were such a strange little boy. Besides, you remember them too.
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